Series Saturday Audiobook Review: Grave Visions by Kalayna Price

Grave Visions by Kalayna Price is the much-anticipated fourth installment in the kick-ass urban fantasy series about Alex Craft, a grave witch who can communicate with the dead.If you want to hear voices from the dead in Nekros City, you call Alex Craft. She's a Grave Witch with reasonable rates and extraordinary powers, who specializes in revealing the secrets of the dead. But now she's the one fighting to keep her own secret. She's not human—and her newly discovered heritage is causing havoc for her both in the human realm and in Faerie. But her status as an unaffiliated fae also makes her an ideal candidate to investigate a new street drug that has surfaced in several of the spaces between the human and fae worlds.

This glamour-infused drug causes hallucinations that turn real—at least for a while and often with deadly consequences. Searching for the source of this drug—and its purpose—lands Alex front and center in the conflict brewing in Faerie and she must find answers before she's dragged so deep she loses her freedom.

There was a long four year wait for the latest installment of the Alex Craft series due to some personal/health issues of the author. I totally respect that and am super glad that she is writing again, and hope that all is well going forward. After the long hiatus, I took the opportunity to re-read the series before picking up Grave Visions and I highly encourage everyone else to do so. I forgot so much that happened, and was really geared up for this story following the emotional star-crossed lovers aspect of Grave Memory. I think everyone was firmly on Team Death after that last book.

So this story picks up roughly where the last left off.. maybe a few months later. Falin has moved in to Alex's loft upon the Queen's orders. This has Alex staying out of her apartment as much as possible, but she won't be able to avoid Falin for long, especially when her next investigation directly involves Faery, the Winter Queen, and a magical drug called Glitter that is killing mortals with glamour. After making a bargain with the Queen, Alex needs to solve this crime and find the traitor or risk fading forever.

I enjoyed the investigation, court intrigue and mystery of this installment. But there was quite a backslide in the romance department. We only see Death a couple of times and they just were not as emotionally (or sexually) engaging as what we have seen in the past. Even the smooches are fading to black these days. I don't need sexytimes in every book I read and think some are better without them... but I still want some kind of emotional engagement. So that part of the story fell a little flat for me when compared to the last book.

Based on the ending,

now that Alex's castle has been moved from Faery to the mortal realm,

I am hoping that we continue to see more of the fae side of the world-building because that is probably my favorite fantastical world. I enjoy Alex's investigations, but I love the cunning and crafty faeries just a tad bit more.